My other clone headed to the garden, a lush and vibrant place of green with a riot of all kinds of floral colors. Shakindria accompanied me.

It is wonderful to have you back, she told me, and accompanying the words were visual snippets and feelings: Shakindria in a cell not far away, fully enrapt by the aura from Coming Together. She had her legs spread wide and eyes firmly closed, playing with herself and feeling everything I was doing to Jacoby.

Thank you, I replied. Unfortunately time is now of the essence. I need to get the cure for my mother up and running, and I’ve never cured a human of cancer before.

Think nothing of it, she told me. Back in Glumpdumpkin she had kept her desires in check, even going so far as to condemn herself to a life in the town after I left, if she could have just a touch of the pleasure I provided. Shakindria had the patience of Tibetan monks, all of them put together. Seek me out when it is time to rest, she added. I will ensure you are properly relaxed.

By draining me dry of every bit of seed I have inside me? I asked her with added mischief.

If that is the rest you require, she replied with equal impish glee. For now, let us save your mother.

The Agency was coming. They might be here in hours, or several days, but it wouldn’t be longer than that.

“Mom!” I called.

My mother paused in the middle of petting Tweedle Dee and waved. She was surrounded by all the others: Ivy, Isabelle, Larelle, Chrysta off a little ways, Tara and Airaconda, Regina, April, Vellenia, Cinzy and Fairy Poppins, and now Celine, Bri, and Steph from Jacoby’s team. Even Muppin was plonked on her big stony butt and watching everything placidly while a number of adventurous city kids climbed on her like a piece of playground equipment.

Presently, my mother was laying in the shade of a tree with a large pillow and a picnic blanket beneath her, and the baby slept on her chest.

The only ones who weren’t here, actually, were Drat and Alan.

The garden had begun to attract a large crowd. Alan had put up a sign, looking at me doubtfully, but when I’d insisted, he just shrugged and set it in the dirt. It read Nuts and fruit free for the picking in big bold letters. The garden now buzzed with bug Nakamamon, and also buzzed with the low hum of disbelieving conversation. People were trying my mango passion fruit fusions, mansions, along with my strawbanas, the pecan-almond splices I’d made that presently didn’t have a good name, the walnut and chestnut splices called westnuts, and all sorts of plain old fruits.

“You have blueberries, and you have blackberries, and they’re both fine,” Tara was saying. “You can just call them purpleberries.”

“Purpleberries sounds bad though,” Isabelle protested, leaning against Ivy while she painted. “I’m not saying you’re bad, but the name doesn’t feel right.”

“But they’re purple!”

I had spliced blueberries with strawberries, which had a pretty great color, were bigger than blueberries, and the seeds on the outsides.

“For the last time they’re strewberries, and nothing you say is going to change that,” Regina said. I had not anticipated Regina’s tummy to be visible this soon. It had been, what, a week? She was showing already.

“Strewberries is the worst name imaginable,” Tara huffed.

“Not like brawberries is any better,” Isabelle protested.

“Every name we come up with is bad,” Regina complained. “This is hard!”

“Not to burst everyone’s bubble,” I said, “but we’re in the endgame.”

Regina rolled her eyes at me. “Trust me, we know all about the endgame.”

“I’m going to be making up the cure for my mom now, even though the cure for the God of Doors isn’t done yet.”

Everyone perked up. After many questions, most of which amounted to ‘are you sure’ and ‘how close to ready are you’ I sighed and affirmed that I was sure. As to the other question, I couldn’t rightly say how close to ready I was… I’d been putting it off due to feeling not at all ready. I did not want to mess this up. Then again, there was no more time.

It was time to mount a defense, protect the baby and the workshop, protect the Fletcher clones.

We quickly drew up a duty roster. Everybody was invested in me curing my mother’s cancer; they liked her. They tolerated me, and mostly kept me around for the orgasms. Then they said they were joking and of course they liked me.

We needed the perimeter scouted, and guards posted for when they did arrive. The Nakamamon in the garden started to drift around, listening in.

“They’re going to come in hard and fast,” I said. “They know that disrupting me from whoever I’m attached to will make the clones vanish.”

***

“This kind of cure, according to the recipe on the tablet, needs a very specific administration,” I explained. “Cinzy will know how weird administering the cure can be.”

“We watched you slap a spoonful of magical goop onto a giant’s butthole,” Ivy said, to laughter. I was glad they were in high spirits. 

It wasn’t hard to get a wire bent into a small hoop to create the wand. It wasn’t hard to do that ten or twelve more times.

What was hard was being in the presence of the cure.

This thing had gone through a whole rainbow of fruity colors and flavors. It smelled like mid-afternoon chill. It smelled like laying in the grass in the park and figuring out what the clouds resembled. The smell slowly morphed into Grandma’s strawberry rhubarb pie, or Grandma’s apple tarts, or whatever good memory you had of your Grandma’s baking.

It bubbled with childlike laughter. It shone with lazy Sunday morning sun showing off drifting motes. It had the same pleasant feeling of Saturday morning cartoons, of weekends spent playing video games for hours, of days chatting with your friends for several hours, singing the new hit songs together. It was the feeling of your homework being done, it was the feeling of having everyone laugh at the joke you’d just thought up on the spot, and having your parents buy your favorite dessert on vacation.

It was difficult to get near, honestly. It had been difficult to finish the cure in the first place, what with the buttery sounds of laughter in grade school coming out of it, and the warm feeling of having everyone go ‘Ohhhhh’ when you made that difficult beach volleyball play.

It was pure goodness, and it couldn’t be watered down. You couldn’t. And there wasn’t any way Healer’s Resistance

could help with it.

Jacoby hadn’t been able to be around after a certain point. I’d called them in one by one to see who I could remain in ‘intimate contact’ with to finish off the cure. The more it distilled down and the water left it, the more it glowed with happiness and rightness and pure, childlike wonder.

Only the highest Durability and lowest Affinity could handle it, which would have included Larelle except her psychic aspect made her highly empathetic. Fairy Poppins and Cinzy were out, from high magic and low Durability respectively. Ivy and Isabelle were pretty good, but the standout member to handle this was Chrysta.

“You and me!” I told her cheerfully. My Affinity was too high, and the stuff had made me loopy. “Me and you, in it together. White and rice. Lemon and lime. Mike and…”

“Chrysta,” she said.

“Mike and Chrysta,” I said, nodding seriously, then broke out into a silly grin and laughed like I’d just made the funniest joke of my or anyone’s lives. She held my hand as I melted to the floor and laughed and laughed.

“Fletcher,” she said. “I worry that you will not be able to administer this cure.”

I shot a finger toward the sky. “You, my dear, are correct. You buttery, crispity waffle.”

“I do not know what that is, though I believe buttery to be a compliment. Regardless, we must transport this concoction of yours to the god and administer the cure while the divine Nakamamon of the compound attempt to prevent us from doing so.”

“Oh, I am all confidence,” I told her.

“Misplaced confidence, perhaps?”

I shot another finger toward the sky. “You may very well be right! Let’s go!”

Muppin was another one with the Durability and low Affinity to make this work, and the Rochidna thudded along with the cure strapped to her back.We also attracted a crowd here, the people drawn by whatever childhood memories they were getting off the mental affliction cure.

“We have to,” I giggled. “We have to keep the people away… hehehehe… away from the cure.” I was pretty sure anyone who touched it was going to stop doing anything except experiencing the hyper concentrated bliss of the cure, and that included breathing.

Shakindria did have the range to float us along with Telekinesis, but she was far too magical as well. Ivy and Isabelle looped one arm each around their shoulders and basically dragged me along with them. Together with Shakindria’s help, we located the correct block floating amongst all the others, and headed up to it.

“You’re okay, Fletcher,” Ivy told me, giving me a warm smile and running her hands up and down my abs. Isabelle joined her.

“I feel like a zillion bucks,” I replied. It was true. I’d won the lottery and kissed the girl of my dreams and been given the key to the city, all at once. The lottery was a mega-bazillions jackpot, the girl was wearing my favorite scent, and the key to the city let me get anywhere I wanted, at any time, at no cost.

The couple flanking me laughed, and I joined in gleefully.

We approached the Eelysian compound, where they had mustered every one of their eel buddies. All of them had their eel mouths open in that amused and anticipatory smile, just waiting for you to get the joke and start laughing.

So I did. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

“You… you went into the God of Doors,” Bert said. Don’t ask me how I knew it was Bert, because—and this is going to sound racist—all eels kind of look the same.

“That’s right beeeeeeeeeeee—”

“What is the meaning of this?”

 “—yotches!” I finished. “I ain’t afraid of no doors.”

Ivy and Isabelle snorted yet again at my expense, but I was too high off the cure to care.

Unfortunately for the Eelysians, they had a gated compound and not a door. If they had a door, all they’d have needed to do was close it, then open it again and their whole compound would’ve been somewhere else. Displaced by the God of Doors somehow.

What an odd parade we must have seemed: a great big rochidna with a pot strapped to its back, an ice ghost Nakamamon, two buff girls cradling their drunk and maniacal boss, and finally a Mindala floating behind all of this at a distance. We were inexorable too, slowly pushing the holy Nakamamon back even before we touched the gate. I did the honors with my two ladies, pushing it open.

“This god is getting fracking healed!” I announced. “You don’t like that, maybe move your monastery somewhere more remote.” I giggled. “Like Montana!”

Ivy and Isabelle both lost it and doubled over laughing.

“Perhaps it would be better for me to handle your care,” Chrysta suggested, and took my hand.

“My lady,” I said with mock seriousness, in my best Victorian era foppish British accent. “It would be my honor to have this dance.” I pronounced it dooooonnnnnnce.

“This is a Fletcher I rarely see,” she said, and lifted me into the air alongside her. Adaptability was already doing the work of reducing any damage I might take from her natural icy aura and ghost powers.

“Ogres are like onions,” I said seriously.

“I can only assume that has great symbolic meaning,” she said.

“And anyone who attacks my people are going to find out which layer is the spiciest!” I called out. Then, feeling like I was doing something hilarious, I engaged Healer’s Resistance to make all my people immune to  Holy Damage for 10 minutes. Sure it cost 5 Durability Tokens, but I had just regenerated all of them.

We parted the eels like a holy man might part the seas, and when a few of them started using divine abilities on us, I used my own powers back on them. First, I grabbed up a bunch of shelled walnuts I’d brought along, and zipped them at Bert. One at a time. Right to the forehead, like a delicious bullet.

The first time made him curse us and order more attacks, but after the twentieth or twenty-first walnut directly to the head, he called a halt. The divine attacks didn’t do anything, and I burned the next 5 Durability Tokens to grant us water immunity as well. It didn’t become clear to him that I wasn’t thunking anyone else in the noggin with walnuts until almost a dozen of them thunked him in the head. He kept right on cursing as he called a halt.

We entered the large domed holy building and beheld the large breathing door lying on the too-small plinth.

“Nice marble they’ve got here,” Isabelle said.

“Shame if somethin’ happened to it,” Ivy said in her best Jersey mobster accent. The two broke down into giggles. The cure was getting to them as well, even despite them being perfect for the job. 

The Eelysians and Celesteels ceased their attacks and let us enter without any further resistance. Ivy and Isabelle found this hilarious. They were Guardians who didn’t need to guard anyone, and their only job here…

“Bring forth the bubbles!” I declared.

Shakindria worked her Telekinesis to undo the knots on the ropes, and with those untied, she floated the pot of cure with the dozen wire loops we had created.

Stupidly, hilariously, we dipped the wire loops into the cure and began blowing into them. The mixture, which had the consistency of soap, quickly formed bubbles that we also blew towards the breathing door.

“More!” I cackled. For some reason I reminded myself of a mad scientist. It didn’t have to make sense to make me laugh like a loon. “Moooooore!”

Watching my ice ghost Nakamamon companion delicately dip several wire loops into the mixture and lean forward to blow the cure into bubbles was the most incongruous and funniest part.

Soon the large holy room was filled with gently dancing bubbles. Some popped before they could reach the god, but others drifted down and settled on the door, then popped a moment later. It was supremely cute, leading to me clapping.

Ivy and Isabelle blew bubbles at one another, snickered, then realized they shouldn’t be doing that, and pointed them at the god instead. Finally, the remainder of the wire loops floated into the mixture of their own volition, and floated up to my face, where I blew them for Shakindria. Dozens of bubbles became hundreds of bubbles, with them filmy with oily and pleasant goodness. They popped in the air, on the walls, on the floor, on the God of Doors. The mood of the place lightened. Eventually the super concentrated great mood lessened in intensity and allowed me to think without a big dopey grin on my face.

The UI eventually gave me the Administer Cure check, and I ended up using Tokens from all four of my beautiful companions to help pass it.

Congratulations! You have successfully cured a divine being.

 This is Christopher inordinately pleased with himself.